Rolling

Our land trust that leases our land to us took us roller skating today. Our boys hadn't been before (other than using the strap-on ones in the garage).

Confession: I was a bit nervous about taking them by myself (my wife had to work). New things to learn don't always go well--especially if they involve falling down. Anders is still riding his bike with training wheels because he's fighting working towards taking them off. And right off the bat, as we were putting on our skates, Anders didn't want to do it anymore because the skates were too tight around his feet (they were the right size, but he wanted more space to move his feet around within the skates).

Surprisingly, Anders was the one who took off. I did a few laps holding on to each of their hands. But Anders starting going by himself. He believes he counted 17 laps around the rink before we left. Nils wasn't as fond of it (though a few hours after we'd left and were home, he wanted to go back and skate some more). And I got a good workout from holding Nils up and keeping him from falling.

Lesson: Its important to keep trying new activities. And keep trying. And keep trying. Anders got a good confidence boost from today. He's up to working on his bike more to get the training wheels off. And Nils is confident enough that it didn't matter to him if he wasn't able to skate well yet. He knows it'll come someday.

Lessons Learned

After school Beth overheard Anders talking with the neighbor boys as they were playing with the boys' new toy:
"We got it for St. Nicholas Day. It's for sharing."

It's good to hear them getting it.

Global Lessons

We recently invested in a new world map. Most of our atlases don't include many of today's countries: Most of Asia is encompasses by one massive union instead of separate nations.

Right now it's hanging on our bookshelf in easy eyesight of our boys. We're showing them where the countries are located that they hear of during the Olympics. They don't entirely get the geo-political boundaries (who does?). They know where a few places are located. But it's hard to comprehend from a map how far apart Minneapolis is from where we used to live outside of Vancouver. Then to try and explain the differences of states and countries and how far apart Australia is from Minnesota . . . they're at least seeing how vast our world is.